Ontario’s shifting college and university workforce
While post-secondary institutions are places of learning, they also employ thousands of people across a broad spectrum of job classifications. This report explores the extent to which workers in Canada’s post-secondary institutions are experiencing precarity. More precisely, it asks whether employment on university and college campuses in Ontario is becoming more precarious, for whom and for what reasons.
This report combines quantitative analysis of Labour Force Survey (LFS) data with qualitative accounts of the lived experience of precarity from post-secondary employees. Overall, the LFS data analysis suggests that 53% of post-secondary education workers in Ontario are, to some extent, precariously employed. Specifically, the report identifies a rise in work categories that are more precarious (e.g., research assistants and teaching assistants) alongside a decline in others that have traditionally been less precarious (e.g., librarians).
About the authors
Erika (she/her) became Director of the National Office in 2020, but began her career at the CCPA in 1997 as director of the Education Project. Originally established to monitor corporate intrusion in public education, the project broadened its focus to include standardized testing, social justice and anti-racism education in schools, educational equity, school finance, child care and early childhood education, tuition and user fees, technology, surveillance and privacy, the arts, and community-based education. In 2000 she also became editor of Our Schools/Our Selves, the popular education journal founded in 1988. It provides commentary and analysis on a wide variety of education-related topics. Erika has a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in English (critical literary analysis) from the University of Guelph. Prior to coming to the CCPA, she worked in Washington DC researching the corporatization of childhood, and was one of the founders of UNPLUG (which became the now-defunct Center for Commercial-Free Public Education). She spends far too much time on social media.
